Stuff

There is also a new TNS BMRB poll out with topline voting intention figures of CON 31%(-1), LAB 40%(-2), LD 11%(+1), Others 18%(+2). Changes are from their last poll a week ago. Up to now TNS have been conducting voting intention polls every month or so, but I understand this is the start of a shift to regular weekly polls.

193 Responses to “New YouGov and TNS BMRB polls”

While we are on the subject of abstruse attempts to combine politics and sport, you could perhaps enlighten me as to Jonathan Edwards’ description of the Paralympics flame as being a combination of the flames from the “four English nations”.

I know of the Heptarchy, but am confused as to which three of them Edwards considers to have been excised.

Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia, Essex, Kent, Sussex and Wessex. Have some of them simply become merged into the “Rest of the South”?

Boris talking out of his posterior re- the Olympics and Salmond. The Olympics was a two week jolly we all watched on the telly from Englandshire and now we are well back to reality. The Scottish electorate will not be influenced by the Olympics in any way. If the UK focussed Olympics was Britain – in Scotland we focussed equallly on our own home grown Olympians – this is localism not patriotism.

I am no fan of Salmond and what might do for him is his increasing authoritaraianism and refusal to allow FOI requests , his inappropriate cronyism, and the eventual defeat of his plans in a referendum .

Salmond has removed any reasons for anyone seeking change in Scotland actually to vote for an “Independent” Scotland with his ridiculous pampering to Unionist fears on the pound, the monarchy and NATO, I suspect a cave in on Nuclear weapon siting next..

Scots are by nature conservative ( not Conservative) so Independence was always going to be a hard sell. But by neutering his own proposals he serves to make it appear pointless – it won’t allow us economic control, or free us of the treaties and commitments of the present regime – and Scots will not vote for a pointless rippng up of the Union to end up in a mini version with a pound, and NATO, and the queen – all as was.

Salmond could of course get lucky – if Boris decides to come to Scotland to campaign vigorously for the Union – with Cameron and Clegg beside him – he might very well get his “Yes!” vote then.

I suspect a cave in on Nuclear weapon siting next..
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I saw two SNP chaps on TV a week ago, or thereabouts.
It is to be debated at their next conference.
One said: Being in NATO is to accept multi-lateralism. Trident will remain until the combined EU NATO countries persuade Russia, the US etc. to remove nuclear weapons from Europe or some such.
The Other said: Bugger off; we have always been for unilateral disarmament & that’s not going to change (I’m paraphrasing!).
8-)

They believed that every Sunday should be spent hopping. They would hop to church, hop through the service, then hop back home again. I tell you, Sunday lunchtimes were a nightmare – we all had to wear sou’westers and asbestos underpants. You see, they took the Bible literally – Adam and Eve, the snake and the apple, took it word for word. Unfortunately, their version had a misprint. It was all based on 1 Corinthians 13: “Faith, Hop and Charity, and the greatest of these is Hop.”

They sure do. All of these critics can’t point to a single thing the guy has done as mayor that they are upsaet at him for. Instead they’re upset over the felonious actions of some of his close campaign associates during the race that got him elected. I feel like some people need to get over it and move on. The last election is over and done with. People need to respect democracy.

Speaking of a frightening disrespect for democracy, check out this article.

“As Romney was approaching the stage, still hugging people, did anyone hear someone shout “No, no, don’t touch me!” in a tone of some distress? I’m sure I did…”

I mostly keep it on mute in order not to raise my blood pressure. But you’re not the only one who heard that. Others at DKos apparently heard that too.

I heard Marco Rubio tried a failed stand up routine and spent most of his speech talking about himself. And I heard that Clint’s speech was problematic. Rachel Maddow described it as ‘the weirdest thing I have ever seen at a political convention.”

Why do I feel like Mitt picked Paul Ryan based solely on the fact that while Paul Ryan is tall, he’s like a 1/2 inch shorter than Mitt is?

Katty Kay on the BBC is saying she thought Romney did well. I’m quite surprised…I was taken aback when I realised he was working up to his denouement, because I was barely aware that the speech had even got warmed up yet. Can’t even remember what he said…

Clint Eastwood’s gig was very awkward. I still love “Unforgiven”, though…”

I could watch some of the speeches Tuesday night…mainly because they were just all around bad. I mean Chris Christie went on for 18 minutes before he even mentioned Romney’s name and then did not do it again for another 6 minutes. But the more this went on, the more I just couldn’t listen.

Now, here’s the funny thing for me about muting Eastwood’s speech. I saw him get several standing ovations from the crowd and thought it must be going really well. It was only later that I found out he spent 20 minutes arguing with a chair that contained a large amount of cussing.

I’m not a fan of Eastwood really but I still enjoyed Dirty Harry.

“Katty Kay on the BBC is saying she thought Romney did well. I’m quite surprised…I was taken aback when I realised he was working up to his denouement, because I was barely aware that the speech had even got warmed up yet. Can’t even remember what he said…”

The first few minutes seemed to be an unfocused series of panders. The last few minutes seemed to be him threatening to go to war with Russia. But maybe the middle part was good (except for when he denied climate change).

OLD NAT
“Do you remember….”
Yeah, and we had ideology. Concise Oxford dictionary: ” ideas at the basis of some economic or political theory or system”. The switch of VI to New Labour (eughh!) in the 1994 Euro-election and then 1997 was because of agreement with ideas for a move away from nationalisation and union confrontational stances, however, also to Blair’s evangelistic image: I’m a straight kind of guy, was somehow to be accepted in someone who believed in Jesus, even if we didn’t. Incidentally see Finkelstein in The Times a couple of days ago, of Jewish gentleman hanging on branch on cliff face, and told by God to let go and have faith in His protective arm: Is anybody else up there?”

It should also possibly be noted, with the government’s first (?) forays in to -40s territory, that Labour consistently was in the -40s to -50s point during the economic crisis – their lowest point being -57 in May 2009.
So from Today’s -40, they only need a 9% drop [1] to do worse than that.

He repeats the line about being leader when LD support was represented by an *asterix – meaning no discernible support – in 1989, though I think AW’s tables for the period show polling companies were still prompting for a continuing SPD during that peroid, and the combined score was pretty much in line with where they are now. (The Guardian has a footnote on the subject in their linked article which could probably do with being updated.)

Be that as it may, Ashdown’s article calling for LDs to show mettle has something of the quality of a LCpl Jones “they don’t like it up ’em” fuge.

The coalition is Clegg/Cameron, if either one were to fall it would be the end… for both of them.

Cameron has always had his detractors in the Tory press, but the piece by Judith Woods about Corby in the Telegraph shows how the line of attack is gaining ground, and highlights grassroots flirting with UKIP. Corby town itself is not the issue… the outlying villiages which normally vote Tory without question is where panic could set in.

It looks like the bottom range of the MOE oscillation is a 9% Labour lead (as in today’s YouGov) and the top end 12%. In terms of averages, the 10-12% leads appear to be occurring with more regularity now and, if we get the odd 9% it seems to be entirely due to Labour’s VI dipping from 44 to 42. The Tory VI is dead-cat-bouncing around 32-33% (lower according to some other pollsters, bar ICM) and it doesn’t look like any development, be it the Olympics, Jubilee or isolated pieces of better economic news, budges it.

I wonder if the upcoming Conference season will have any lasting effect? Outbreaks of internecine war at either the Lib Dem or Tory conferences, and evidence of mutiny amongst the ranks, could damage the coalition’s standing still further. There’s always potential dangers for Labour at their annual get-together, although less now than in the vintage old days, but it’s looking as if Miliband and his party could be the main gainers from what are now largely choreographed week long exercises in public relations.

Let’s say I have 30 polls, each with 1700 people (MoE of 2.38 if population is 45,000,000, according to ComRes calculator), and I establish using MAD that three poll figures for a given party are outliers.

Can I sum the population for the 27 polls (27 x 1700 = 45900) and use the result for calculating MoE for the MAD result?

If I did, the MAD MoE would be 0.46 which is lot less. Assuming I can do this, I take it that while MAD can be used to generate a rough average over a period, if we start trying to apply MoE over a period (which is constantly changing), the range of samples has to be very strict?

I imagine that 30 polls is fine for MAD, but for MoE the number would have to be less (e.g. 15 polls).

Or should I be taking the average of the non-outlier polls (back to 1700) and apply that MoE for the MAD result?

You need to take things less seriously in my opinion. A world record in hopping doesn’t stop it being hopping [and I realise he did a skip and a jump also and was jolly good at the entire combination.]

Old Nat: in 825, Sussex, Essex and Kent came under Wessex’ rule. For some time before that, Kentish independence was only patchy and it had been under Offa’s Mercia.

So it was the four Kingdoms that merged a century later to form England. East Anglia and Northumberland were conquered by Vikings/Danes and reconquered by Alfred the Great’s son (Edward the Elder, who inherited the kingdoms of Wessex from Alfred and Mercia from his sister), and grandsons Athelstan, Edmund I and Eadred.

Athelstan could also claim to be king of the British, after the treaty of Eamont Bridge saw the kings of Alba, Strathclyde and Wales give him fealty.

Scary stuff in that article! I was particularly struck by this passage –

“I have written before how ironic it is that a liberal jurist can be disqualified from a judicial confirmation hearing for expressing a single progressive idea in a law review article, whereas when it comes to conservative judicial nominees extreme and full-throated ideological exhortations are usually an added bonus.”

While I don’t think any judge in any court in the British Isles or Western Europe (perhaps) would make such outrageously political statements, it does have resonance with the way that the media establishment reacts to some judges here.

A friend of mine was a Sheriff here (a judge very roughly equivalent to a County Court judge in England – I don’t know what the US equivalent would be). He frequently commented that socially conservative shrieval statements were seldom criticised, while the mildest of comments from a more liberal standpoint was likely to have the Scottish Daily Mail or the Scotsman making apoplectic criticisms of it.

Take your point that face-to-face polling may have shown a stronger effect. Is there any data to show if there’s been a change along those lines in recent times? And if there has been a change, is the “shy” effect still nonetheless significant?

Take your point also that the don’t know reallocation thing gives a means of correcting for shynessthough that doesn’t mean there isn’t an effect. The question remains whether there’s an increased effect for LDs since the coalition. Perhaps from local election data?

Accept the retro-shyness thing could complicate things further. In the end, the way to settle the matter re: shyness is to simply compare the numbers who actually vote for a party in an election with what was said shortly before in polls and see if there’s a significant mismatch. I was just wondering if local elections had maybe already shown an effect or not.